Austen Goslin

This might be the funniest cast Disney has ever assembled in the MCU. Every character plays off the others wonderfully, giving the whole movie the kind of chemistry that the franchise hasn’t had since the original Avengers.

By smartly leaning on the tools of horror movies rather than war movies, the co-directors have made one of the most tense and scary movies of the year so far, along with some of the most harrowing cinematic combat ever put to film.

The movie is so twisted up in its own metaphor that it can’t muster up a single ounce of terror for the one thing we all came to see: a werewolf.

Smile 2 is bigger, scarier, funnier, smarter, darker, and undeniably better than its predecessor.

Balancing a mood like this, equal parts terrifying and funny, feels nearly impossible, particularly when falling too far to either side would topple the movie entirely. But Perkins never slips — he keeps the tension and discomfort perfectly measured throughout. That tone is exactly what makes Longlegs creepy, rather than scary.

With all these elements working in dreadful harmony, Kurosawa has made far and away one of the best horror movies of the year so far, and he sets a more complete and frightening tone in less than half the run time of most of those movies.

It’s a comedy about self-serious criminals for as long as it needs to be, a vampire slasher for as long as that’s fun, and a story about a vampire who craves love and attention by the end, fluidly shifting from one tone and genre to the next at exactly the right moment. Even more impressively, each version of Abigail is just as fun and bloody as the last.

It’s a franchise reduced to nothing more than a parade of hollow, familiar images, lightly repackaged in hopes that we’ll buy another ticket and try to revisit the emotions we felt when we encountered this world for the first time.

The movie is full of mood and carefully paced terror that is more sustained than bolstered, with a plotty ending that never pays off the movie’s conspiratorial promise. The good news is, in true exploitation fashion, the movie’s final moments are grisly, pitch-black, and perfect.

It gets lost in a maze of awful storytelling and frustrating characters, all without offering anything more than the stock-standard horror tropes that have been done better in a million other movies.

Dune: Part Two is exactly the movie Part One promised it could be, the rare sequel that not only outdoes its predecessor, but improves it in retrospect… One of the best blockbusters of the century so far.

Yet for all the boring set pieces, bad exposition, and faulty universe expansion, Johnson, Sweeney, Merced, and O’Connor still manage to find tiny spaces where their charisma can peek through.

For horror fans, it’s a rare treat and a fantastic exercise in taking a genre in the opposite direction that everyone else has tried.

A Real Pain isn’t a movie about real conclusions or grand statements, but one about deeply personal relationships and how pain and history can affect them. In that way, it’s powerful, as well as deeply funny and touching.

The footage-forward approach does make the whole thing tremendously fun to watch.

It’s got one terrifically creepy sequence, a genuinely fascinating family story, some solid jokes, and a thermal spring that’s also sort of an ancient god. And if that still isn’t enough for you, it’s also weirdly as much about baseball as it is about swimming at night.

By taking away the spectacle of violence, Glazer’s film shows another side of one of history’s greatest atrocities. The scale of the human catastrophe sets in not because it’s represented, but because the characters don’t seem to notice it at all.

Few movies have ever struck that balance quite as well as Craven’s four Scream movies. Thanksgiving doesn’t quite reach that series’ meteoric heights, but it comes far closer than anything else in recent years — including the Scream franchise itself.

AGGRO DR1FT isn’t an enjoyable or particularly well-made movie, but it is the movie I’ve thought about most this year. For better or worse, that’s worth something.

In the process of stripping the series down to essentials, Green and co-writer Peter Sattler have made the most boring, uninspired version of The Exorcist imaginable: a regular old exorcism movie.

The Pope’s Exorcist doesn’t match the bone-deep terror or filmmaking heights of the original Exorcist, but sets itself apart by building the whole movie on an understanding that its whole premise is a little silly — and it’s never afraid to lean into that fact.

Every moment of M3GAN is both endearingly silly and sneeringly mean, which is what gives it its power.

Orphan: First Kill is a tremendously clever slasher that has fun with, and lives up to, its absurd premise.

The Invitation never manages to be scary, and it hides its vampires behind a lifeless love story.

With Afterlife’s endless string of callbacks, Jason Reitman lovingly pays homage to his father’s series, but the new characters are where Jason’s own intimate and personal style of filmmaking shines through.

Demonic is a frustrating movie, because in spite of all the problems, the world Blomkamp sets up is exciting and original.

It’s too pretty for a midnight showing, but far too gross and skin-crawling for when the sun’s up. It could have either been a wonderful gourmet action-movie meal, or a greasy joyful mess that cult audiences love more than they should. Instead, it’s somewhere in the middle — a pretty good meal that doesn’t measure up to its individual ingredients.

The sequel abandons clever mysteries in favor of more straightforward action-horror, losing some of what made the original special in the process.